I follow the Labor Department’s monthly employment report closely, and have been tweeting out the news and analysis almost every month for the past few years.

And like most financial journalists, I often focus on what it means for Federal Reserve monetary policy: Will they or won’t they raise rates at their next meeting?

But last week, I realized that month after month, the same industries were producing the most new jobs.

When I dug deeper, I found that was indeed true, not just month after month but year after year.

Some industries — like education and health care — are adding jobs at a rate well above the national average; others are growing much more slowly, and one, manufacturing, has seen employment plunge over the past quarter-century.

The table, below, shows the economy’s dramatic shift since 1990. And except for manufacturing, where jobs declined following big trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), policy decisions appear to have had little direct impact on this natural evolution to a service economy.

Changes in employment in various sectors — 1990-2016:

Sector

Employment - Jan. 1990

Employment - April 2016 *

Percentage change

Annualized percentage change

Education

1,664,000

3,259,600

112%

2.9%

Health Care

9,114,300

19,048,300

109%

2.8%

Professional and Business Services

10,778,000

20,116,000

87%

2.4%

Food Services and Drinking Places

6,538,500

11,308,300

73%

2.1%

Transportation and Warehousing

3.448,400

4,881,800

42%

1.3%

Total Employment

109,184,000

143,915,000

32%

1.1%

Financial Activities

6,586,000

8,249,000

25%

0.9%

Construction

5,422,000

6,670,000

23%

0.8%

Government

18,151,000

22,077,000

22%

0.8%

Retail Trade

13,254,700

15,915,200

20%

0.7%

Manufacturing

17,797,000

12,297,000

-31%

-1.4%

* April 2016 figures are preliminary. Source: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics

I’ll get to the candidates later. But let’s first look at where the jobs are and aren’t.

Winners:

1. Education had the biggest employment growth during the past 26 years, up 112%, or nearly 3% a year. Salaries range from around a mean of $25,000 a year for teacher assistants to about $90,000 for administrators. Teachers earn between $57,000 to $60,000.

2. Health care also has seen employment more than double since 1990. It also shows a wide dispersion of earnings between doctors, dentists and surgeons, who are among the highest-paid professionals; managers, who earn more than $100,000, and home health aides, who earn around $22,000.

3. Professional and business services encompass everything from accountants to consultants to software developers. The latter two are among the highest paid and the most rapidly growing over the past quarter-century. Lawyers, executives and software developers all make over $100,000 a year.

Losers:

1. Manufacturing. Since its June 1979 peak, U.S. manufacturing has shed more than 7 million jobs, and average pay is now just over $20 an hour. Whole industries have been wiped out. Angie Clinton of the Bureau of Labor Statistics told me that U.S. apparel manufacturing jobs have plummeted from 939,000 in January 1990 to only 134,000 last month. But when was the last time you bought a garment made in the USA?

3. Government. More than 22 million Americans work for federal, state and local governments, which together are the largest U.S. employer. But government jobs are growing by less than 1% a year, and there are 600,000 fewer of them since their peak in June 2009 as states, municipalities and even the federal government tightened their belts after the Great Recession.

All of this underscores that this nation is going through as big a structural change as it did a century ago when we transitioned from an agricultural to a manufacturing economy, aided by major technological breakthroughs.

New technologies, demographics and globalization (including those trade agreements) are moving the economy through its next big transformation.

This is profound, and it can’t be stopped. Government policies should be designed to provide retraining for displaced workers and help ease the pain for those on the wrong side of creative destruction.

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